


Hannibal Short Fiction

by candyriot



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cannibalism, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Hands, Jealousy, M/M, Somnophilia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-16 20:22:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 7,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29581599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candyriot/pseuds/candyriot
Summary: Short fiction for Twitter.See individual chapter tags.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 10
Kudos: 35





	1. // nsfw / somnophilia

“You drugged my whiskey,” Will slurs, fingers on his temples pinching his forehead to spur him against sleep and squinting through blurry vision. The book he’s been reading lies in his lap.

“I’m not planning to kill you, Will,” Hannibal placates, in high spirits to be at the receiving end of Will’s withering expression.

Groaning resentment Will’s hand falls to his lap. He strikes his head against the back of the chair to some effect. 

“I would, however, enjoy the company of your body in your incapacity,” Hannibal proposes.

“You’ll pay for it later,” Will mutters sourly without denying him, his eyes shut.

Ceasing to resist the hypnotic in his veins, after several grumpy minutes his body goes slack, slipping into slumber. The book falls to the floor.

To induce utter unconsciousness, however desirable, would mean monitoring his breathing too closely for Hannibal to enjoy himself. He is content to enjoy Will pliant.

All but alone in the room with Will’s body, Hannibal smiles to himself, remembering other times he had Will unconscious — greasy and clammy and bleeding. How he undressed him, baring wounded and scarred skin to the light, and touched that ragged, naked expanse, though only chastely. He has no interest in taking anything Will wouldn’t willingly give. The concessions are part of the appeal, while he’d never mistake Will for submissive.

The promise of tit for tat is an enticement that quickens his pulse as he rises from his chair and approaches the slumped and absent man. He thinks of Will helplessly unconscious on their drive to Minnesota, on fire with encephalitis.

He reaches out, stroking his thumb through Will’s unruly curls, watching them spring soft from beneath his touch. For years, Will has as often worn his hair close-shorn, but he concedes to Hannibal when asked to let it grow.

Hannibal touches the scar on his forehead, then that on his cheek — deep scars which will never fade. Will is beautiful in slumber, his long, dark lashes gently blanketing his eyes.

Hannibal reaches down to the hem of his undershirt and strips him with care, his breath catching and throat bobbing as he bares a broad and all but hairless chest, square shoulders, more scars. He drags the thin fabric over arms thick from Will’s tinkering and outdoorsmanship. He doesn’t let those arms fall carelessly.

Dropping to his knees, floor hard through the light cloth of his nightclothes, he reverently traces his fingertips along the smile on Will’s belly. He could betray him. Dissect him. Consume him. The cannibal part of him never surrenders the hope he’ll choose to turn predator, to devour.

He knows, too, that Will is, however great their affection, forever tempted to execute him and revel in his own power.

He strips Will of his plaid flannel trousers with the same care as his shirt. He smirks fondly at his flaccid cock, pleased to be between sturdy thighs. How many times has he been in this same position? But with a far more assertive consort. His cock heats with the familiarity of this body, of Will’s scent thick in his nostrils, however muted compared to Will in full arousal.

Tonight, no demanding hand grabs at his hair. Will lies, thighs parted, in repose.

Carrying the familiar dead weight of Will to their bedroom presents a slight difficulty compared to his easy strength at the time they met, but then he’s deep into his fifties. He still retains prowess enough to kill.

Now it’s kisses over bare skin and the scrape of teeth as his hands ply a gently stirring, drowsily groaning man he’s free to manipulate as he’s wont. His hands slide up Will’s lax arms, pushing them up the bed to lie limp above his curly head, Will exposed to him. 

He sucks and tongues at him, leaving hickies on his chest that will purple by morning and lapping at the silk of his lightly puckered nipples. His palms work the softness of Will’s abdomen, intimate in their knowledge of the muscles and vulnerable organs beneath.

His hand glides down the trail of dark hairs that guide him to Will’s cock. He pulls on it with amusement and thumbs the head, drinking Will’s suffering catches of breath while knowing the younger man won’t be more than half hard. 

When Will lies thighs pushed wide and arms still limp on the pillow, fingers incrementally curling and uncurling, Hannibal rises from the bed to secure their lube — a substance more often reserved for himself, though Will indulges his rough surprises.

When he’s inside him, fucking him, rolling over him, feeling the hair of his chest drag against Will’s pale skin, Will’s flesh enslaved to his pleasure, he pictures Will’s retribution. His own bruised and stinging skin. Will Will act out of fury, or cold cruelty? His loving, vicious boy.

He pants over him, breath damp against the scar beautifying Will’s cheek. A hand again travels Will’s face, his thumb dragging over Will’s closed eye. Over the prickle of his patchy stubble. 

Real hunger swells in the furnace of his belly. He latches his teeth to his neck. Digs his fingernails into his body. Imagines. Bucks up hard against him, but releases him from his bite before the vulnerable skin rips. 

He savors the slack way Will takes him, his body shoved against up the mattress with every thrust. He’s clammy with sweat while beads roll off Hannibal. Both their hair sticks to their scalps. Hannibal loves Will’s curls wet. Soaked. Clinging closer than this. Though at those times memories tear at him.

He comes, using all of Will to receive him, powerful hands ruling his body. Manipulated roughly, Will whines.

Hannibal collapses heavy over him and places gentle and worshipful kisses with love but without apology. He withdraws when he begins to grow flaccid, but continues to kiss and to touch, mesmerized by Will’s unconscious beauty. 

Will will wake up crusty, and crabby. He’ll be sour and surly and stab at his breakfast. He’ll plot and, later, he’ll take. The taking is the fruit of his becoming. The rest is fair warning.

For now, for tonight, Hannibal controls him completely in the way he once did those many years ago at the time he committed great violence against the inhibitions separating Will from his higher self. 

He folds Will’s arms over his torso, arranges his legs, covers him and grooms his bangs. 

This care, too, is an exercise in power.


	2. // sfw / hands / “Tome-Wan”

He has large, strong hands with manicured fingernails and veins that stand out like ropes. Will remembers those hands on his body, arresting his arm as Hannibal pushed hypodermic needles beneath his skin; wrenching his head back as Hannibal forced a feeding tube down his throat; holding his face as he trembled and seized, and holding him again in the barn as Hannibal waxed poetic over his violence after disarming him of his pistol with subtle grace. The same hands that cleaned and bandaged his knuckles, firm but gentle in a dreamlike way. 

Will wonders how often Hannibal fantasizes about killing him with those hands. Hannibal follows his nature and murder comes naturally to him, no matter how many voracious tangents are restricted to the confines of fantasy. 

Would he strangle him, watching his eyes go dead, or would he deal a precise blow to his throat and crush his voice to silence before the mutilation?

He knows that at any moment, without warning, Hannibal might kick his legs from underneath him, or concuss him against a hard surface. And if Hannibal didn’t get the drop, Will suspects the odds would still be against him in a fight with this man, his senior but as strong or stronger and far better accustomed to taking life.

Strange, then, that the feeling of having Hannibal in his presence, in his home, where the cannibal has already violated him, planted evidence against him which confined him behind bars, and just snapped the neck of Mason Verger fills him with calm confidence. His spirit brims with the guiltless pleasure of the limp body of the man who intended to murder them both lying high and unconscious in his armchair. 

They’ve called Margot. She’ll come and Mason will disappear. A pig, slaughtered to feed the dogs.

Will had imagined, before, what it might look like when Hannibal kills. He’d known that the man’s pulse remains calm and steady, yet there was an unexpected quality to seeing him unmake a human life. A flavor. A texture. A power. 

Hannibal looked no more or less human than he did standing beside him as he wiped the blood of Mason’s torn face onto the sleeves of the limp corpse. 

He follows Hannibal into his kitchen. He watches the man scrub his deadly hands underneath the faucet, palms rubbing together and passing over the backs of each and Hannibal meticulously cleaning beneath his fingernails. The man looks up to him with a slight smile, a quirk of his lips only visible in the darkness for how close Will is standing. Will wants to observe, and learn, and absorb.

There’s a weight low in his belly. Excitement. He smells Hannibal’s expensive cologne but can’t tell the one brand from any other.

Hannibal turns to him, smile disappearing into composure, face blank except for the sharp intelligence behind his eyes. He raises his hand, palm sliding soft over Will’s cheek, the barest edge of roughness. It’s not the equal to Will’s work-hardened palms, but Hannibal doesn’t live an effortless life. He is not the pampered feline he presents as. From the brisk, brutal way he severed Mason’s spine, he’s as alien and feral as Will could have imagined.

A long thumb caresses Will’s cheek. A shudder ripples down Will’s spine. 

He has every piece of evidence he needs to convict this man, but to debase this private moment with politics would be unholy. All of Will stands in irrational agreement that Hannibal’s unmaking, if there is an unmaking, should be the theater he’d want and deserves.

The sound of a car engine outside.

“That would be Margot,” Hannibal say. 

He drops his hand and returns to the living room, leaving Will with his water-cool touch on his flushed-hot skin.


	3. // nsfw / opera

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> // inspired by conversation with @willsblackstag

La traviata. Violetta has been dying of tuberculosis for over an hour. She's giving her lover Alfredo the dodge. Every piercing soprano sentence is excruciatingly long.

Hannibal is crying.

It’s digging under Will’s skin. The tears, the stiff tuxedo Hannibal manipulated him into, the fact that in the whole silent audience he seems to be the only person this bored and restless. 

A sidelong gaze. He slowly moves his hand to rest on Hannibal’s leg. Eyes on the stage, now, he lets it drift over the expensive black material to rest in the heat of the man’s inner thigh.

The corner of Will’s lip twitches at the sound of Hannibal’s shaky inhalation, as otherwise unmoving as the cannibal sits. The blood rushing to Will’s own cock is a welcome distraction from the opera dragging on.

His thumb strokes the fabric barely separating him from intimate skin.

He hears Hannibal swallow. His smile gets a little wider.

It takes the edge off. 

He doesn’t make Hannibal come fishing and he didn’t sign on for a crying boyfriend.

Later, at home in their colonial style Havana home, he’s thumbing open the single button of Hannibal’s jacket and stripping it down his strong shoulders. He’s pulling the damn bow tie off him and undoing the buttons of his pleated dress shirt until he’s exposed the dark, wispy curls shot through with grey that pelt Hannibal’s chest.

Unspooled on the mattress, Hannibal’s still sore-eyed. He pants through open lips.

Will gets the man’s trousers off and loosens his own tux. He fucks him more than half dressed. A bunch of needlessly expensive black cloth rumpled and creased.

It’s powerful, Hannibal unmanned, searching Will’s face with the raw vulnerability of someone put through indescribable emotional extremes. He’s pliant to kisses that devour as Will thrusts into him, consuming not only Hannibal’s lips but his jaw, the skin behind his ears, his neck. Will’s groans with all the feeling he’s dragging out of the man, Hannibal coaxed into a dazed and boneless surrender worth Will’s hours of wavering patience. A receptive body for as hard or as slow as he wants to fuck him.

Come stains their tuxedos and stains the comforter where it leaks from Hannibal’s used body. Their dress shirts stick translucent to their sweating skin. Will looks down on Hannibal’s flushed, placid and guilelessly open face, adoration unmasked, and Will laughs, bright and clear, annoyance long gone. He traces his thumb across Hannibal’s lower lip. The older man smiles, unabashed to be seen naked not in body but in spirit.

“I’ll get the wine,” Will says. It’s not a whiskey night.

“You are, of course, not invited next time, Will,” Hannibal chides without malice as Will disentangles them and tucks his spent cock back into his trousers. “You ruined the third act.”

Will stops, turning back to him. Brows lifting lopsided, he sticks his hands on his hips.

“First? I never asked to go. And by the third act? I was ready to get up there and kill her myself.”

Hannibal’s eyes sharpen with a new and different hunger.

“I admit I would have liked to see that.”


	4. // nsfw / jealousy, face-fucking, cannibalism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dead Dove: Do Not Eat
> 
> // adapted from conversation with @willsblackstag

The plate touches the wooden table with a ceramic sound.

“Natchitoches meat pie. Ground… beef, with onion, bell pepper, celery, garlic and seasoning in a wheat flour shell. With red beans and rice and fried okra. I went easy on the pepper. We’ll work up to jambalaya.”

“I sometimes forget you are from your own country, Will. Louisiana is a unique intersection of culinary traditions,” Hannibal says, assessing the modest presentation.

“Thank you, Dr. Lecter, for trusting me with the last cuts of meat.”

/Dr. Lecter/, so carefully articulated, remains suspended in the same air made savory with the thick scent of deep fried pies.

“The remaining cuts were suitable to your strengths,” Hannibal defers.

He picks up the first pie, eschewing the meticulous application of silverware out of respect if not for tradition then for the near-audible tension electrifying the man standing over him. 

This borderline state of acuity is neither one of Will’s cold, dangerous calms nor one of his tremorous rages. It could easily become either.

“The first European pastries were made to contain and preserve their fillings, not to be eaten themselves,” Hannibal says, holding and turning the pie in close consideration. “They were made of rye flour, and called ‘coffins’.”

His teeth sink though the empanada-shaped crust. He savors Bedelia Du Maurier slowly.

Will sees the change in Hannibal, the impetus for risky curiosity taking hold. Mischievous, honied brown eyes dare to rise to Will’s amber-dashed blue. A cat-got-the-cream smile spreads on Hannibal’s lips.

“Would I be in trouble for saying she tastes nice?”

Any trace of expression disappears from Will’s face. Perfectly still, he watches as Hannibal alternately savors the pies and applies his fork to the flavorful sides. 

Paying Will no attention, the cannibal takes his time, finally pushing the last bite of pie through his lips, letting himself taste his own fingertips as his hand withdraws.

The tension breaks.

Will’s fist closes tight in Hannibal’s side-swept hair, worn longer, now, relative to before.

He wrenches him from the chair, both of them silent but for breathing. Shorter, he doesn’t let him stand upright, commanding the bent man to their bedroom. 

He knows, rationally, that he saw Bedelia die, her life snuffed at Hannibal’s hands. He knows, irrationally, that he hated her from the moment he and Jack Crawford found her in the Florence apartment she shared with Hannibal. A bitter, consuming hatred that stoked vitriol in him every time he saw the woman. 

Jealousy.

The vitriol fuels him as he drives Hannibal to his knees in front of the bed. A satisfying lance of spite spikes through his chest, accelerating his pulse and leaving him breathing deep, shaky breaths.

He can’t shake the image of Hannibal sensuously biting through the crust of the pie, and with it the image of Hannibal between Bedelia’s thighs, licking deep.

He doesn’t know if they had sex. He can’t, without asking. He isn’t prepared for what the wrong answer could inflict. On Hannibal. On himself.

After all these years it shouldn’t matter anymore what Hannibal shared or didn’t share with Bedelia in Italy. But finding her there, finding her with a diamond worth more than his car on her ring finger, had been a viscerally unpleasant shock Will can’t forget. 

He knows it could have been him in Paris, in Florence. He spurned Hannibal, and by the time he’d been ready to repent Hannibal had already decided to exact compensation.

Will knows that much. What he can’t understand — doesn’t want to imagine — is himself and Abagail being replaced.

Hannibal remains kneeling on the hard wooden floor, head bowed, hair a mess, patient and breathing evenly.

Eyes on the man, Will unbuttons his slacks, shoving his zipper down, the parting metal teeth violently loud.

Hannibal knew what — who —he was provoking. That doesn’t mean Will can take half measures. If Will holds back with him, the man will act out the same ways he’s acted out so many times in the past. 

He kicks his pants and underwear off, sitting down on the foot of the bed, a calm sense of power sharpening his worst impulses. 

Hannibal looks all too human: eyes lowered, his disheveled hair falling in his eyes, stray strands licking in wild directions. Pretentions abolished.

It should inspire empathy, and it does. The kind that lets Will enjoy the inescapable tension one predator feels when at another’s mercy. 

His own unsteady breath catches as Hannibal raises his eyes to his, depth of emotion undisguised.

Hannibal loves him, sees and loves the ugliest parts of him, and at broken intervals that, by itself, demands more of him than he knows how to give. 

This, he knows how to take.

“Get me hard.”

The same firm, curt style of command he’d use with a dog.

Curling his fingers back into Hannibal’s hair, fine strands clutched in rough knuckles, he drags the man into the space between his bare thighs. Hannibal readily takes up his just-stiffening cock in his hand. He alternately sucks and strokes it, stoking arousal in its soft length, ambitious yet calm. 

No surprise. They first fell into bed in a halting way, too much pain shared between them — touch too often a weapon. But Hannibal has a generous mouth.

Blood pumps to Will’s hardening cock, a rush that throbs with heat. His labored breathing becomes throaty, loud. He shuts his eyes, shuddering, fist clenching tighter and relaxing. 

Hannibal catches him up in his attentions despite the furnace of anger in his chest, cheeks sunken in diligence beneath sharp cheekbones and his lips plush around him. His hot tongue bathes the head of his cock in caresses. He glides diligently over the shaft while his hand continues to coax. Will’s shallow thrusts brush across his hard palate. 

He’s more than a wet hole, agile muscle and warm breath and a brilliant and sensitive mind.

What Will wants him to feel like is a wet hole

No warning. His hips push forward as he hauls him close, the large, blunt head of his cock opening Hannibal’s throat around him. He remembers a tube shoved roughly down his own throat, the brutality of it diminished only by his own feverish lack of motor control. There’s no pity here.

He fucks him in long, rude shoves, hissing through his teeth at the pain of the just-off angle, a pressure that hurts, sucking in air, himself, but not letting up until Hannibal, for all his talents, convulses, body and throat. 

He pushes his gagging boyfriend off him. 

Both of them flushed, the blood hot on Hannibal’s pale skin across his cheeks and shoulders, eyes stung red with involuntary tears, Hannibal refuses to look sour or ill used. Shoulders heaving, he breathes open-mouthed and ragged but only as deeply as his pride will allow. Thick strings of spit hang between them in ropes.

He’s looking up at Will from beneath blonde lashes. Hannibal has aged since they first met, fine lines etched deeper around his eyes. 

Will has seen him in all his sadism, now, and he has since abetted him. His partner provokes him to take the hide out of him, but Hannibal can exercise all the same deadly strength and the same self control as when they first met. And Hannibal is still just as emotionally voracious. 

The man wanted to raise a reaction at dinner because he wanted Will’s full attention, and Will wonders if that’s why he wanted him to find him with Bedelia in Florence. 

“If you throw up, you’ll waste the meat,” Will chides, feeling malice but a smile sneaking into the corners of his mouth as he draws Hannibal close again and the man so-slightly tilts his head to lap Will back down, drool clinging to Will’s pubic curls.

He benevolently lets Hannibal set their pace, keeping a firm pressure on the back of his head, thrusting shallow but not driving him forward until Hannibal invites it himself. 

Liquid soft flesh engulfs him painlessly as they negotiate their positions.

His voice lowers to a rough whisper.

“Swallow.”

With Hannibal’s throat rippling around him, a waterfall of pleasure that raises a moan from Will, the world beyond the two of them vanishing in a wet bliss that demands pain from Hannibal’s raw flesh, Will’s anger breaks.

Erratic, Will’s pulse tattoos the fact that this man loves him — just him. Never Bedelia Du Maurier.

He’s relaxed but he’s hard, unspent, as Hannibal withdraws to nurse him shallowly, the man’s breathing hoarse. Drool rolls sloppy down the underside of Will’s cock, dripping off him. Next, Hannibal coaxes his orgasm from him, mouth and hand, again, and everything swallowed. The taste of Will’s cooking erased. The human flesh in his stomach commingled with Will’s come.

“Are you quite satisfied?” the cannibal asks, wrecked voice rough as a mile of gravel backroad, eyes again alight with curiosity.

“For right now?” Will asks, combing his fingers through Hannibal’s disheveled hair.

Will can’t articulate that if Hannibal didn’t sleep with Bedelia, he should say it. 

He won’t beg for that, and Hannibal declines to answer. The older man only rests his head against Will’s thigh, face turned in toward his skin in trust, breathing wetly through an abused throat but reposed. 

Sharing the same spaces. Sharing touch. The same air. Wielding knives together when they work in the kitchen. With all the dark things that come naturally to them, every act demands trust — so much that every human boundary has shifted and blurred.


	5. // nsfw / muzzled Will

He pulls the leather strap through the buckle and, dragging it tight, secures the prongs through the holes in the leather.

Another strap, now, cured hide sliding against cured hide, and he has his lover muzzled — not identically to the picture Ms. Lounds featured on TattleCrime, but as close a device as he could obtain. Hard, clear plastic armors Will’s jaw, covering his mouth and his nose.

He smiles as Will’s eyes, so fantastically large, cooly follow his actions.

“There are limits to my good graces, William.”

Will smiles, too, and turns on his knees on the bed, crawling closer. He presses into Hannibal, the smooth, breathing hole punctuated plastic pushed against his skin as he noses at him.

“You muzzling me because you don’t trust me, or because you don’t trust yourself not to beg for it?” Will mocks, voice in its lowest, gravelly register.

The frisson of his always-unpredictable lover’s voice at his ear spurs pleasure in Hannibal’s cock.

In the moment, in this physical excitement, he can’t say he knows the answer, despite the warm, unpleasant, infected ache on his right shoulder blade rooted in two crescent sets of small furrows incised by Will Graham’s teeth. 

They nuzzle together, Hannibal scenting the rich, musty smell of old leather off the mask, the vetiver, pepper, tobacco and myrrh of the aftershave Hannibal has imposed on Will, and the intoxicating perfumes of Will’s body while Will, thwarted, makes a sound of frustration and sighs through his restraint.

Will’s weight on Hannibal, the younger man’s fingers slide up his naked side, trespassing across his skin to touch the gauze covering his teeth’s work. A delicate prickling sensation against the torn flesh below.

Resting back on one arm, Hannibal, fascinated, reciprocates the touch, enjoying the warmth of Will’s toned, scarred, age-touched body beneath his hand.

“Penetration will be more conventional tonight, unless you’re hiding a knife,” he says.

Neither ever makes love completely certain the other is without one ready to hand, but, for his part, as exhilarating as it is to unexpectedly deprive Will of the upper hand with the surprise of cold steel, for now — though he privately harbors his own secret ambitions — Hannibal wants only to spur Will on.

Will is frequently unkind, and he’s especially unkind, tonight, in a show of virility, using his hands and his weight and sharp thrusts of his cock to assert all the power he still possesses, defanged. 

He’s dangerously controlling, moreso for Hannibal’s good humor, and inflicts himself until the older man begins to feel erotically sore used, the body that’s gaping for Will wrested into especially permissive, gasping positions, then fucked face down, half suffocated, until lights burst behind Hannibal’s eyelids and reality winnows to the foreign pressure of plastic against his wounded back, the thick cock intractably thrusting through him and his own impaired breathing.

Blissfully dominated, he comes into the sheets he’s ground against.

Hannibal relishes Will’s worst abuses, the fact he could never have dictated that Will, whose darkness he untethered, would yearn to feed from him like the Caucasian Eagle, ever returning, was by Prometheus daily nourished. 

Will’s outpourings of attention are frequently, by themselves, enough to sustain Hannibal in kind. 

In a lifetime spent cultivating pretenses and manipulations, Will is the dangerous gift of liberation, again and again stripping him bare. 

But tonight, he hungers still.

What Hannibal cultivates and Will lacks is patience and stamina once action has been instigated. Will Graham has never come around to the conservation of energy, neither emotionally nor in sex nor in violence, prone to expending himself.

Bullied and bruised, scraped raw by blunt fingernails and regaining his air, Hannibal diligently collects his strong but slighter lover into his arms. The humor that was stolen with his breath has returned in force as Will, his drowsy, dizzy head on his shoulder, pants behind the fog of his mask, the plastic beaded with small drops of water. Red welts have dug into Will’s cheeks at the plasric’s sharp edges. His hair is matted beneath old leather now soaked in his sweat. His blue eyes dazed.

“Did you feel powerful, Will? An animal, barely restrained?” Hannibal asks, his voice tickling Will’s ear.

“Hannibal,” Will warns, suspicions aroused. Except he remains limp weight in his arms, spent, his younger body, on the border of sleep, inescapably surrendered.

The sadist in Hannibal surveys this victim who was only just the aggressor and thrills at fact Will too-eagerly played into its hands.

“I said I have limits, mangustėli. Now, I’m going to find yours — without even those teeth to snap at me.”


	6. // nsfw / drunk Will

Will leaves the bar in a subaquatic state of intoxication.

He passes dark skinned women in the Havana streets, dresses layered with brightly colored ruffles like tropical birds, beautiful in ways Will appreciates, echoes of the flirting companion he spent the evening laughing beside.

He enters the home he shares with Hannibal, world swimming. The man lifts his brow.

“The stench of you is astounding,” he observes as Will crosses the floor directly to their living room bar to pour himself another two fingers of whiskey, which seems important to have.

“I wanted to unwind. I unwound,” Will says, Louisiana twang in his words, grinning. He raises his glass in his boyfriend’s direction, then sips from the sweet, oaky liquor.

Hannibal closes his iPad — a conceited purchase on an island of Android devices — and sets it aside, rising from his favorite leather chair to approach his sloppily smiling partner.

“We are beyond the point I can avoid nursing you through a hangover, but there’s no reason to exacerbate the situation,” he chides, smoothly removing the glass from Will’s hand and disappearing the whiskey down his own throat.

“Planning to join me, doctor?” Will urges, uninhibited, taking a step into Hannibal’s space and loosely resting his hands on a clothed waist soft with the paunch of age, however unbelievably powerful the body.

“Too much alcohol is bad for my disposition,” Hannibal defers, gazing down on Will with irrepressible fondness. The flare of his nostrils. “You were with a woman.”

“She and I had a conversation,” Will drawls smugly, fingers curling in Hannibal’s untucked dress shirt. Hannibal could find her by his nose alone, hunt her down like a Bluetick hound. Whether he’ll decide to later is up to chance. For the moment, he’s amused. 

Hannibal sets the empty glass aside and reaches out to cup Will’s face, a gesture familiar for so many reasons, right and wrong. Only the right speaks to Will in his inebriation. Hannibal’s thumb strokes his curls.

Will knows Hannibal is beautiful. Not like the woman on the barstool beside him, laughing and resting her hand on his thigh. Like something carved by a Classical sculptor, square and defined. Except that his eyes, when he’s looking at Will, are anything but stony. They’re soft and they’re bright. Sentimental. Limpid. 

It can be a lot, when Will is sober, to have Hannibal look at him like that after everything they’ve put each other through. To know Hannibal loves him, ferociously, in a way he doesn’t know if he can return. 

That’s not because anything about Hannibal repulses him. Not his taste for flesh. Not seeing him mutilate a living victim in cold blood for a social slight. Not because Will isn’t attracted, or committed, or bound. But he doesn’t know if he can love the way Hannibal does. He’s too acerbic, too flinty. He’s too cruel —

— and right now his hand’s come up and he’s dragged Hannibal down and as their lips mesh he’s sloppy, like he wants to drown him, and he’s using too much tongue, but his partner is guiding him. He kisses him until they’re both spit slick and neither of them can breathe.

“I’m /really/ drunk,” Will says, part of his brain registering that he’s the kind of drunk where he’s liable to get caught in a loop about how drunk he is. He clamps down on repeating it, if barely.

“And I’m going to take advantage of you,” Hannibal assures — pleasantly, adoringly ominous.

Time breaks up. Hannibal’s gone upstairs. Will pours more, too much, whiskey. Will has it taken away. He’s on his knees bent over that leather chair, face down in it, rough hands fisted, cursing and sweating, his pants pooled on the floor beneath him and Hannibal arched over him, breathing down his neck, hard up on his hips, air loud with the clap of flesh as he thrusts out an orgasm. 

They’re in a tangle on the carpet, Will leaking cum, and Will’s latched to his mouth again, drinking him, lazy body caught up by Hannibal’s strength while groping bare flesh. At some point, Hannibal lost his shirt. At some point, Hannibal brings him off with his hand, Will’s forehead pressed to his body and Will gasping for breath.

Looking down at him, Hannibal wets his lips. His throat bobs how it does when he’s caught up in his emotions, something stuck in his throat. Will can imagine it, he can feel it in his own body, but those emotions aren’t his. It’s one of the ways he knows he’s a different, though no less deadly, species of animal.

Hannibal’s words, carefully articulated:

“You don’t have to be drunk, Will.”

Will, fucked out, thoughts slippery.

“...what if I do?”

They laugh when he’s sober. They laugh, how they used to, Hannibal catching Will by surprise. But Will wants to hurt him. Hannibal thinks about killing him. It’s difficult to forget the pain written on his body in scars. 

He doesn’t lose himself. Not anymore, despite the state of him after their fall. He knows who he is, and this time he’s sure. But that man often holds affection in reserve.

He spreads his hand through the grey hair of Hannibal’s left breast, seeking his heartbeat.

“I’m not made the way you are, Hannibal.”

He likes how Hannibal smells, though. He likes the strong scent of sex. He likes being wet and open, however often their roles are reversed.

A frown knits his brow.

“—you could have taken advantage of me, when I was afraid.”

Alana could have, too. She didn’t. He was as malleable, then, as he is tonight.

Hannibal makes a vague gesture, fleetingly wears a bored look.

“Your body is beautiful, but not particularly unique without your mind.”

The crease in Will’s brow deepens. Will can’t pin down if a fact is an insult. The thought slides away. His brow rises, lopsided.

“You wouldn’t say I’m out of my head, right now?” he asks, his sarcasm bone dry in an otherwise fluid world.

Hannibal presses a patient kiss to his forehead.

Repeats slowly, with careful kindness: 

“You don’t have to be drunk.”

Will’s next conscious moment is under sheets cool on his naked and sweating skin. He wonders if he walked, or if Hannibal carried him. If he undressed, or if Hannibal undressed him.

He knows, vaguely, that he’ll keep Hannibal up all night putting water in him so he’s not too much to deal with, not too surly in the morning.

He wants to be somebody else. To be tractable. He wants to curb his tongue, and return the gentle emotions Hannibal, though not always kind, pours out on him disproportionately.

He wants to sit with this longing longer, until he inhabits it.

The alcohol has him, and he blacks out.


	7. // nsfw  / Hannibal study

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> // inspired by @anguissette89

A layer of heightened emotion touches every aspect of Hannibal’s world, one among the many differences which distinguish him from the ugly herd of human life that clusters close to the psychological mean. 

It inflicts specific sensitivities. He experiences art as a tapestry of thoughts and sensations. Music compels him to moods that consume him totally. Sustenance embodies the pageantry of theatre. Indescribable feelings cascade through his consciousness as a body in agony suffers beneath his implements. 

He cannot abide blundering crudeness from the dull animals that surround him. Each aesthetic slight drags an ugly smudge through his variegated emotional landscape, undiminished by time, that only the death of the noxious perpetrator erases. When he exposes to the world the shameful unsightliness the body once contained, he is transcendent.

He has met a single human being who creates an utterly opposite impression.

Will Graham can be a spiteful little man, but he leaves vivid splashes of color with his passage, unforgettably vibrant hues rising from the intensity of his character.

Coincidentally, in his genius, holds the unique potential to see the world as Hannibal otherwise alone sees it, by looking out of Hannibal’s own eyes.

Hannibal took to Will immediately, and has hardly spent an hour without the man in his thoughts since.

Hannibal, for his part, offered what he could in tribute to win his company — the singular gift of freeing him of the shame and fear society yoked him with like a millstone around his neck to enslave a soaring imagination that otherwise knows no limitations.

When he condemned him to prison, he sat each missed appointment studying the afterimage of him in the chair across from him, a portrait painted from each charged moment, tortured or revelatory, that Will spent in his care.

When Will destroyed his idea of a life built for three, it turned Hannibal to destruction, a catastrophe on the scale of his first loss engulfing his well-ordered life in reckless chaos. The emotional landscape of his world turned nightmare, so that every good thing became in that moment repulsive and the need to visit the pain he felt on Will blinded him to all else.

Since fallout resolved, he no longer believes he can exist if Will Graham ceases to hold him in mind, and on this matter he can’t differentiate fact from delusion.

He contains a love violent in its imposition upon his reality. Violent, too, in reality — agony inflicted, blood shed.

It could only be endured by his total capitulation, and for the first time since Mischa left him, on his knees before Jack Crawford in the cold, he felt a world could exist where he might be whole. 

Will made him whole urging him into his arms on the bloody precipice of their rebirth, though the aftermath of any failed murder-suicide needs must face a turmltuous negotiation.

It took time and trials and the two of them reconciling with a radically new existence before they consummated physically what they shared in spirit.

To become one flesh with Will tries Hannibal’s limits. He luxuriates in sensualism, but a deluge of sight and scent and sound assaults him each time he’s permitted the bare, pale skin into which has been carved their history — disfigurements of flesh that evoke every past extreme of emotion. Hannibal exists as a fact on Will’s skin in the same way Will persists beneath his own.

He’s had men throughout his lifetime, and, less often, men have had him, not because he took less pleasure from receiving them but because they rarely performed to his standards. 

By contrast, so often with Will, he experiences no second presence when Will penetrates him but only Will, totally. It makes no difference if he is indulged or if he is abused. He becomes sensation, so that if his capitulation could be called selfless it’s because he is without self. He remembers each encounter in full, yet these mélanges return to him in the manner of symphonic orchestrations, as pure emotion.

He takes a different, purposeful approach to fucking Will, always conscious of the palette he paints with and careful in his selection of effect. At these times he is the composer, not the composition. At his most violent with Will — and while often gentler, at rare intersections he has been all but fatally violent — he still thinks, foremost, of the aesthetic effect not upon himself but upon his lover. These acts are selfish, because Will exists as a crucible wherein he forms molten art.

It would be too much for either of them, they would be too much for one another, if not for the hunts, shared or separate, into which they outpour excess desire. Desire fledged from darkness that would end either or both their lives if visited on each other.

Killing with Will bears no semblance to killing alone. 

On the hunt Will seeks prey that challenges him. He transforms his victims in ways that reflect secret inward images of them that his visionary empathy reveals. To sate himself, he must in some way know them. 

When they hunt together, they make compromises. Sometimes they take on big game, others they slaughter pigs. Sometimes Hannibal’s sadism is indulged, sometimes Will’s feral brutality. 

Before Will Graham, Hannibal saw no association between killing and sexual pleasure. He can no longer say that, because their panting kisses, their fellating, their parted thighs and penetration reconcile them to whatever sacrifices they make for the sake of unity.

Not only this, but returning home still pleased in the aftermath of private violence inspires the shedding of their human guises, clothes haphazardly discarded, sweating and rutting bodies no more than tools to share a higher ecstasy.

As glorious a world as Hannibal has contained the capacity to experience throughout his life, in this sea change he can no longer say if he was alive after Mischa and before Will Graham.


	8. // nsfw / choking, edgeplay

He lets Hannibal strip him, lay him on his back, praise him with his mouth. He feels the heat of Hannibal over him. The scent of the man surrounds him, rich and spicy, blanketing him from any world beyond their bed. He hasn’t let Hannibal inside him in weeks, so he lets him take his time licking into him before tongue and fingertips are replaced with the stretch of his partner’s cock.

He holds the man above him’s face into his bare hands, already knowing what he’ll inflict on Hannibal. He traces a thumb across the scar Jack Crawford left on Hannibal’s sharp cheekbone in Italy, years ago, now. Hannibal leans in to kiss him and Will laughs, turning his face away.

“You’re gonna taste like ass.”

“It could be our last kiss.”

“Then our last kiss will be our last kiss. The one that didn’t taste like ass.”

Hannibal scoffs and with a snap of his hips shoves up on Will hard enough to make him hiss, but Hannibal isn’t the one in control.

Will lets him freely enjoy him, though, as he reaches beside them for the pair of black leather gloves he brought to bed. He pulls them tight over his hands, stretching his fingers out inside them. He understands the precision he’s sacrificing the same way he understands what Hannibal wants.

He exhales, settling his mind, touching his partner with gloves on — chest, clavicles and shoulders and face, again, too — letting him feel the soft danger of them while he receives and Hannibal’s pleasure builds.

He takes his partner’s neck in hand, thrilling with a white-hot sense of ownership.

He finds Hannibal’s carotid arteries through familiarity, pressing inward with thumb and index finger, seeing the light of excitement in his lover’s eyes that affirms the surety of his grasp.

Hannibal has explained, in clinical terms, every way that asphyxiation can kill him, from premature ventricular contractions of the heart to a sudden, radical change in the pH of the blood to the dislodgement of plaques that lead to stroke. 

Will pictures him in their living room, bare chested, legs crossed, wearing loose, striped night pants. He can hear his voice, gently factual.

Having choked victims to death — having seen, felt and ensured the point of no return — is of no help, Hannibal said, because of the unpredictability of the practice.

And still, as they moved through the kitchen at breakfast, Hannibal stepped into Will’s space and took one of Will’s hands in both of his, pressing his soft lips to his knuckles, saying:

“I want your hands around my neck, tonight.”

Not for the first time.

Will feels the rough cloth on the inside of his gloves and the creases in the leather that sheathes it. He feels the give of Hannibal’s neck. He understands the pretensions the gloves represent, a refined language of domination and subjugation. A language he’s learned.

Now, he has Hannibal, face flushed, looking down on him with the same intensity as in all Will’s depraved fantasies of depriving him of his life. It wouldn’t have to be an accident, a death by misadventure. He has the power in his hands to choke his lover to the point of collapse, beyond any possibility of recovery. The part of him that would exult in it is one he has a shaky history of keeping in check.

Hannibal has craved the risk since their earliest days. Flirted with death twice at gunpoint in kitchens. Was twice almost taken with a knife. Dared the death penalty. Allowed Will to cast them into the cold Atlantic, where rip tides could have dragged them to the depths.

Maybe this is how his partner expects and even wants to die: to be sacrificed for Will’s pleasure. Hannibal could never be satisfied with an ordinary death.

He releases the pressure, letting oxygenated blood rush to Hannibal’s head, restoring him to life.

Hannibal draws a measured breath, unflummoxed. 

Will’s smile, now, is of a different, colder nature.

“I’m going to watch you lose control.”

It’s the same as throttling an engine, bringing Hannibal in and out of lucidity with his body ever pursuing pleasure inside Will, dazed or focused, thrusts that’s force speak the delicious little details of his state of mind.

The plea that surfaces in Hannibal’s eyes is Will’s cue to take it a step too far.

A guiding hand on one broad shoulder Will tightens his grasp. Nature does it’s cruel work, Will awash with voyeuristic pleasure.

Hannibal blinks in and out of his swoon. His thrusts stutter, one moment sharp, uncontrolled jerks, another weakly sliding deeper, muscles uncoordinated, to stave off falling out of Will.

Will releases his grasp, a pulse of arousal twitching in his cock as Hannibal, pushed a step beyond his near-perfect self mastery and trembling, hauls in air.

“Fuck me,” he orders as his partner’s arms strengthen and Hannibal, nothing if not perseverent, obeys, driving his cock into Will, however disoriented, until his whole body shudders, elbows buckling without totally collapsing.

“Good,” Will praises, closing his eyes to hold the image of Hannibal’s orgasm perfectly in his mind. “That’s good.”

He knows Hannibal relishes the attention, takes ecstasy from his voice. It didn’t come naturally to Will, talking someone through sex. He felt ridiculous, until the obvious effects convinced him of the utility of the thing — soon, he found his own joy in it.

Hannibal’s weight sinks onto him, a controlled descent that’s no cause for concern, though Hannibal does slip out, leaving Will empty with his unspent erection pressed between them.

He’s leaking clear, syrupy precum all over himself. He knows Hannibal, when returned to his right mind, won’t waste it. 

In the strangest sex act he’s ever performed, he got convinced to drizzle it over a savory dessert, Hannibal edging him and then making him watch him enjoy it.

He touches his partner slowly, carefully watching his face for any sign of physical distress while his gloved hands assert the love that Hannibal prizes. Hannibal: for decades a lonely predator before Will first seduced him those days in his office and nights over dinner once he consented to play his games.

If Hannibal is one of the big cats, Will is something else, but something that can share this comfort and this love even as they tempt God and death.


End file.
